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Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Road Diary
TacocaT Tour Diary Part Two: ’80s Night is On Friday

posted by
TacocaT
on
October 9 at
12:58 PM

DAY THREE
BREE: Downtime. Everyone crashes in my grandparent's basement and wants to go to Disneyland. I borrow my brother Brian's employee pass and his friends' season passes and Tacocat impersonates them for the day since the pictures are so blurry.

LELAH: We watch the season finale of Rock of Love. The stripper lost. Then Disneyland. Eric was so frightened by the Tower of Terror, he grabbed the old man to his left.

BREE: I thought Heather should have won. I don't like Jess.

DAY FOUR: Adderall Nighter
EMILY: We arrive at Scolari's Office in San Diego where we are greeted by a trio of scuzzy grandpa hobo types and a toothless crackpot of a woman wearing a burgundy velvet bucket hat. Stepping out of the van to unload our equipment, the geezers ask if we are the strippers. Eric clarifies that HE's the stripper and lifts his shirt. Later, stoned and vaguely weirded out, I am approached by an old-timer who can only be described as the most sun-damaged human I've ever encountered. He introduces himself as a "singer/songwriter" who will be observing our show later to consider me for his upcoming Christmas compilation. He did not end up at our show after all, but something about the food crusted around his lips had already told me that. After loading in and briefly wondering if our light up tambourine was safe to leave in the bar, it's time to eat! Eric is set on a Mexican restaurant that is located "right around the corner." Two miles and countless false alarms later, we find it, eat delicious burritos and begin the trek back. We see the Cops when we get back and join them at a bar that was celebrating "Tiki Tuesday."

BREE: Tiki Tuesday at the Pink Elephant was kitty corner from Scolari's Office. At first we were enamored with the Hawaiian band playing sweet Tiki jams, but several pineapple vodka's and bucket sized margaritas later Emily gets into some sort of verbal altercation with the ukulele player. This part of the night is a bit of a blur, but I DO remember yelling and pointing. "It's Tiki night," says the sass mouth ukulele player over the mic, taking a look at Emily's palm tree ponytail and stripey socks. "80s night is on Fridays" DISS! Then we start some sort of competition with the "Angry Chicken" dance early on. It's the Chicken Dance, but serious. Lelah takes chicken dancing pretty far out later, but she says she doesn't remember.

The Chicken Dance.

EMILY: Our show was decent for the amount of alcohol involved. It's apparent the Cops are our new best friends-they made our show and after massive amounts of dancing we made theirs. Chicken Dance-offs and pineapple vodkas ruled the night!

BREE: I make a comment about David Icke at our show before our Reptile song. Once again, all the creepsters flock to Emily and get to corner her on a serious discussion about the Reptilian Agenda while I get off scott free. Ha ha ha. The Cops are super fun. Lelah gets a super fan named Bear Paw who buys some merch.

Lelah and Bear Paw.

LELAH: He corrects me that it's Bear Paw, not Bear Claw. He's not a doughnut.

BREE: He requests some XL shirts to be made next time around. Lelah seems to have developed a profound connection with Bear Paw.

DAY FIVE: Shark Bait
BREE: Driving. We stop in Malibu because Eric has some Egg salad sandwich he absolutely must have while he is down here. It were so so. But it's hot and we stop at the beach, have an amazing time swimming and then all of a sudden a fucking seal is swimming next to us! Fucking incredible! It was so cute. Eric swims away from the baby seal in fear, and our friend Adam loses his underwear in the turbulent surf and somehow puts them back on backwards. Me and the Roadie Rachel are on our periods and the song "Shark Bait" is briefly considered, but quickly thrown out. We drive to San Francisco and don't get there at 4 am. My friend Kallisa has an amazing super old house in the Mission District, which is nice to see after all the strip malls in LA. Lelah and Eric sleep in the van. The fucking Blue Angel's wake everyone up in the morning. Fuck the Blue Angels! I thought I was done with them for the year.

Road Diary
TacocaT Tour Diary: Is There a House Bong?

posted by
TacocaT
on
October 2 at
4:30 PM

DAY ONE

BREE: I'm so stoked that we are taking our first tour down the west coast, especially because I'm a sham of a bass player. Our drummer Lelah bought a $600 van on Craigslist for touring, but two days before we leave a forklift from the construction site next door knocks out the back window. They avoid our calls and threats about fixing it, so we duct tape a corkboard to it. Its really cold and windy to sit next to. Another thing to worry about is Eric is still on probation for a stupid drug felony he got at SXSW last year, so he's paranoid about smoking in the van. Bummer!

I had spent the afternoon silkscreening our band tshirts with Megan from Don't Stop Believin' Records. It has a dolphin on a walker, but the dolphin isn't crippled. It's just the only way it can walk on land. I also make several dozen pairs of cat ears as a cheap, gimmicky way to make some gas money since we don't have a record to sell yet. Ears sell like hotcakes. A bunch of bands tell me t-shirts sell way better than records. Isn't that weird?

Our first show is in Longview, which is an hour north of Portland and the hometown to Lelah and Eric. The show is at the Chinese Gardens, which was where we played our first show months and months ago, and one of the more welcoming spots for Tacocat. Everyone cheers for Emily's kazoo solos. I notice that she is getting better at kazooing.

(Overheard between two girls at last call: "That's where I know you!! You were crimping my hair while I went to the bathroom at Josh's party!!" Whoa.) Then as planned, we drive five fucking hours to Ashland. Eric works graveyard shift at the airport, so his vampire schedule accommodates night driving. He gets to stay sober and drive. Haha!

EMILY: Long drive! No sleep until Doug's. Bree and I snaggled the couch at 9 am. There are deer in the yard at 7 am and Bree is so tired--she distrusts them and is convinced they are aggressive. Deer. "Do they bite?" Later, Eric taps Bree on the ear until she forks over some grass. "Is there a house bong?" Eric would like to know.

DAY TWO

BREE: So when we roll into Davis at like 8 pm, the only people at Delta of Venus is the bartender and the sound guy. This makes us pretty nervous. I try smoothing nerves out of Emily by insisting it will be neat, like a chance to practice our new songs. In front of strangers. In a strange city. We cash in drink tickets asap and begin slamming beers. Surprisingly, by the time we play, the place fills up suddenly and becomes our danceiest show ever.

The band the Cops from Seattle randomly stop by, and are all super nice dudes. They tell us they are playing down the block and that we should stop by since the crowd is kind of bizarre. When we get there it looks like a fratty breeding ground for human monsters. Girls in halter tops loudly make fun of our clothes, and a poor man's version of Linkin Park is opening. Cops are, not surprisingly, the only good band playing tonight; we have a drunken dance off to their set before we have to go catch up with Eric.

LELAH: We walked from B St. to G St. drinking our gas station purchase of "Go Girl" energy drinks on the way to see the Cops at the G Street Pub. We were greeted with a frat spectacle. Emily needed her birth certificate to get in. I told Bree she looked like an angel walking through a sea of demons. We walk back to B St. and Bree and Emily drunkenly push over and accost some fratties and steal their balloons. As we run away laughing they scream that they are going to "pillage our assholes."

BREE: The surprising turnout from our show earlier goads me to drunkenly inform the cashier at In-N-Out that we "totally killed it." Some kids that were at the show earlier sit by us and tell us they liked us, but we are too stoned and confused to make any sense in our conversation with them. We finish our burgers and drive to Sacramento to stay with our friends Heather and Andrew, who set up the show. They kindly donate the floor for the night.

LELAH: Eric and I play Yahtzee by the light of a cell phone. Worst game ever, but I won! Slept in the van. Not too bad. We have breakfast at the clown themed "Pancake Circus" and get an oil change. Six hours to LA.